Today's mini-badlander is brought to you by burgers. Or fast food as erotica gone overboard. Yes, I have laughed as hard at the "I'd hit it" flash banner and the 'piece of meat' burger poster as you have. These guys take it one step further and fancy their women dressing up as.... wait for it... Burger workers.

Once upon a time, there was a Jeep ad from BBDO Copenhagen where the car was not to be seen. Presumably it had parked somewhere quite remote because all that witnessed of the Jeeps existence was the parking attendant/police decked out in full mountain climbing gear with ropes and an axe. Hardy har, Jeeps can park anywhere! Sold!

A couple of years later TANK Y&R Stockholm had a think for Hyundai, and struck upon the same idea. Failing to grasp "less is more" they dressed the ad up with a headline to write the viewer on the nose with insolently easy to park, while the parking attendant/police was dressed up in full fishing gear. Presumably to protect her from mud, and perhaps wade through a creek or two - but it would have been rather funny had the Hyundai in question been an amphibious car.

Last year a school class of twelve year olds reported ToysRus Christmas catalogue to the Advertising Ombudsman in Sweden for "sexual discrimination" in their advertising - and won.

The class said that in the catalogue "All the girls are always dressed in pink, only found on the princess and Barbie pages, posing 'awkward' and never included in any of the action toy areas". The kids suggested that the background colors of the catalogue should be made neutral instead of stark pinks and blues, that girls should also been seen on the Lego and Toy car pages and that the princess and knight dress up pages could be gender mixed as suggestions on how to "stop reinforcing traditional gender roles". The class ended their motivation with calling the catalogue "old-fashioned and insulting". The Advertising Ombudsman took their time, but have now agreed with the class and Toys R Us need to rethink that pink. Source: Aftonbladet

Must scratch another Badland itch. Adfreak pointed out that mutant animals wear converse, and the second image they show with all the posters on one wall reminded me of Amsterdam way back then, where walls of 'wild posters' would annoy me every day because I couldn't figure out if that Two Dogs lemonade campaign from Garbers international was trying to make a "hair if the dog" pun or not. Not that similar, but photoshopping strange new creatures together seems to be popular in Adland.

Welcome to this weeks first Badlander - and the first time that The Foundry, Melbourne ended up in here. We're here to inform y'all that the "little dealer" idea has been done before, and besides, it's better as a poster.

So we got this submission showing "hair handles" on the bus, and I thought "gee haven't I seen that before?" and I begin refreshing my memory googling Germany, Gliss and TBWA Düsseldorf - sure enough I end up at joelapompe.net looking at the braid-badlander there. He's like a ninja this guy. Hat off to you Joe.

Credits - the Johnny Andrean hair most recent bus handle braids comes from Fortune Indonesia, The left image shows Gliss hair braids from TBWA Düsseldorf which you can find in the Cannes Lions Archive, the lower right is from Young & Rubicam Frankfurt 2008, also found in the Cannes Lions archive.

Update: So Politiken.dk has an article revealing that the Danish tourist board is behind #Karen26 - with the idea spawned by Grey. Forget Tivoli, that teeny disappointment of a statue known as the little mermaid, the beautiful light of Skagen that inspired world renowned art, Legoland, the quaint walking street Strøget, Danish design, the 'lawless' Christiania with its art, music and funny cigarettes and open-minded living. These days Denmark is most known for cartoons that offend muslims, deporting muslims asylum seekers by forcing them out of churches in the middle of the night, and hippie-land Christiania is about to be torn down.

A little birdie emailed me a good question last night: ..would this be worthy of an ad award for ad creativity? Reward the ad 'creatives' who found the artist and put the cause to it? - gee when you put it that way it seems like a no. Has it really become the norm as the Director of the copy-catted "Sorry I'm Late" stop motion film Tony Manonsky said: It feels like some creatives should get the title "researchers" as they sit and scan the web for ideas that they can sell to clients.

See, around a year ago Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo’s was making ice Sculptures of 'Melting Men' and placing them where people would photograph and blog about it. Check Believe it or not's post dated August 2008 and now we find the same ice sculptures doing their melting for WWF. (course, nobody noticed they were so busy talking about that 911 stuff).

Ice sculptures in the shape of humans are placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin September 2, 2009. Hosted by the German World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 1,000 ice sculptures made by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo were positioned on the steps in the German capital at noon, to highlight climate change in the arctic region. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

This weeks ban could be filed under "that's what Dov was going for all along", as an American Apparel ad has been banned in the UK by the ASA for featuring a girl looking underage and the shots "suggested she was stripping off for an amateur photo shoot". Isn't that their entire 'campaign'? The ASA ruling also reads: "Because the ad could be seen to sexualise a model who appeared to be a child, under the age of 16 years, we concluded that it was inappropriate and could cause serious offence to some readers.'' The ad appeared in VICE magazine, where it paled in comparison to the editorial content. ;)

The folks at Glue UK have recently launched Team Hunter, an online game where you have to try and identify 50 football team nicknames from a huge illustrated collage of things that at first glance are unrelated to football, for News of the World's returning Score section. Wait, yes...for our regular visitors, you might have heard of an idea or two like this already. It's similar to Stella Artois' print campaign with the hidden films (2005), Virgin's viral game (2005) and Spot The Song commercial (2006), and Absolut's find the bottle game from 2006. True, it's been a while since we've seen something playing with this type of execution. I'm honestly a bit surprised we haven't seen more of it. And it's nice that they included the appropriate social sharing capabilities to show off your scores on Facebook, etc.

Eh? What on earth? Isn't that pretty much exactly the same old joke? (Like the Berlitz language school, this advert seems to be based in what is a rather old joke, I should know I tell old jokes like a parrot all the time.) And since that is only one out of many examples, what is going on here?

On Facebook there's this comment:

A topic started on the official group on 15 august (1 am ya3ni 14 bas belel shewaya) stating that:
“TNTV is proud to compare the funniest TV content and duplicate it in Arabic. However, in each promo there is a difference. Find out and win an interview on Al Kahera Wal Nas in front of 70 Million viewers.Check out the fillers on YouTube and compare them to the original.”

So... They meant it as a game? but wait, there's more:

Notice that the previous was posted only on facebook and the website, for internet geeks to shut up, but never on TV, as only facebook users knew then about the whole rip off thing, tv watchers supposedly didn't know, han3arrafhom leh???

OK, that does seem rather odd. I have no idea what is the gameplan here. Did they make that "Game" thing up as to cover their asses after they got caught, or was there in fact a "game" in it? If so , what do us badland-obessed people win? I'd love a trip to Egypt!